Expiring Gallery Links - Major issue for how we use the forums and DAZ Deals
SapphireBlue
Posts: 1,362
Gallery links don't seem to work as before since the end of March, start of April. In the members forum, Richard mentioned that it's a change to the way the gallery now functions - snippet below. I thought I'd post about it here, because some of it is a little unclear. A formal announcement about what changes have been made and why would be helpful. If the mods know more about the changes, please do share!
My main question now is whether it applies to newly added images only or whether it will get applied retroactively to older images?
(EDIT: It seems to work retroactively - see a post or two down)
I tried clicking on some older images and saw that the image locations are now coming back with one of the new temp links. One can still link to the gallery page that has the image and description in it, just not the actual image. One cannot link to the gallery page though, if it's an unpublished page.
Some of the consequences are that newly added images to the gallery now don't show up in the "gallery items" section for those of us using DAZ Deals free or paid version.
If it's retroactively applied to older images too, then all of those in the "gallery items" section might go away, which many of us use when shopping for things. AND things we posted before in the forums will disappear - renders that we did for challenges, tests, explanations etc. etc. (Some of us post our images to the gallery in published or unpublished form rather then attaching it to the post when embedding images in the forums posts...)
Richard Haseltine said:
SapphireBlue said:
Richard Haseltine said:
... SNIP...
Gallery links expire, you need to attach to your post and then link to that for the inline version (without deleting the attachment).
Is that a new change or a temporary glitch? I noticed it first at the end of Mar/start of April. I also noticed more gallery images go missing from where they're linked to on the product pages with DAZ deals too.
It is deliberate, I'm afraid. I have noticed one or two other sites now seem to be doing the same.
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Comments
... seriously?
I want to see better integration of the gallery into the store and forum, not worse; this is supposed to be an art community, after all.
We should have things like the gallery integration on store pages by default rather than relying on a third-party plug-in - it would help encourage product tagging, and serve as free advertising. If you need to be careful about what's on the store page, hide it under a tab, make sure images have to be pre-moderated, give vendors the option to block specific images or artists, whatever, I don't care, but it should be there.
There should be a search, we should be able to add new tags, we should be able to follow artists, we should get notifications about comments, our gallery should be accessible from our forum page.
We shouldn't have worse integration of the forum and gallery. If it's a problem about people hot-linking from off-site and using Daz's storage as free hosting, and you need to do something to rein that in with some kind of token system, surely it's possible to arrange authorisation when it's one of your own site's forum pages requesting the image.
Matt_Castle It's retroactive!
My signature banner disappeared, since it was in the gallery and not uploaded to the forums - I put it on my own site now. Linwelly's signature banner is gone.
Look at your images in the Render your buys! All time challenges page:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/657491/render-your-buys-all-time-challenges/p5
Okay I went further back to the main Render your buys! thread - 1st page from 2023. Images from FirstBastion, me, Linwelly, mding are all GONE.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/650936/render-your-buys-use-buys-from-the-current-month-and-the-previous-month-of-sales/p1
Worse is where we post instructional screenshots in the forums that are hosted in the gallery. If those go, what is the point of the explanation or answer we give?
Also, I posted an example of the DAZ Deals issue in its thread: Junk made a recent image series with Mousso's Ivory. It's all showing up broken. And if it's retroactive, all those links are going to disappear. That's a tool many of us use to help decide things to buy.
Oh, you have got to be KIDDING.
I've specifically used the on-site gallery for years because it should have avoided the issues with yet another image hosting site going dark or changing its user agreement, and because despite the gallery's poor integration with the forums it's still massively more convenient having one central gallery rather than a load of forum attachments strewn across hundreds of posts over dozens of different threads (with a search function that is absolutely, totally, completely and entirely useless for almost any actual purpose), but no, apparently we can't have anything nice.
This is utterly unacceptable Daz. The community has already been suffering for some time for a decline in the actual art content - back when I first arrived, product release threads were alive with people posting renders of what they'd done with it, while now we're far more likely to get a barrage of complaints about the price or how mediaeval market places shouldn't have potatoes (how dare you get that wrong, I have twenty seven degrees in history, and this product is useless to anyone and every one, blah blah blah).
You know what would really make that whole thing worse? Making most of the art that has been posted entirely disappear.
I really hope this is a temporary bug or oversight that someone is going to fix sharpish.
This certainly broke a lot of image links here in the Daz3d forums.
Daz seems to also have changed their CDN provider:
Older link of one of my picture in the Render your buys discussion:
https://gcdn.daz3d.com/gallery/image/1363060/1739560182/main.jpg
The new one from the gallery:
https://storage.googleapis.com/daz3d-gallery-media/gallery/image/1363060/1739560182/main.jpg?X-Goog-Algorithm=GOOG4-RSA-SHA256&[email protected]/20250410/auto/storage/goog4_request&X-Goog-Date=20250410T065338Z&X-Goog-Expires=899&X-Goog-Signature=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&X-Goog-SignedHeaders=host
X-Goog-Expires=899 means that the link is valid for around 15 minutes.
I don't know enough about Google Cloud Storage, but hopefully, it's possible to restore how we were able to use the gallery, both to share renders on the forum and to view them through Daz Deals when we're thinking about buying something.
I may be mistaken but it could be so Ai bots cannot scrape images for training
And it is also possible that some people were using the daz gallery hosting space for off site usage. That could be clearly problematic. And if Daz wants to address that they have that right. Hopefully it gets straightened out. Lots and lots of broken links in long threads here in the daz forums. It is unfortunate.
That thought crossed my mind, as I thought the reasons must be cost and/or security issues.
It's the extensive damage to the forums that just saddens me. I go to older and newer forum threads to see products in use, figure out issues with them or look through answers people have shared about problems in DS. If renders and screenshots are linked from the gallery, the usefulness of the information will be seriously affected.
It would have been nice to get a heads up and an explanation. It would have been nice if they'd considered a way to preserve the embeds in the forums.
(Ugh, that sad emoji is seriously not enough to convey anything. 
)
I can't see how this would stop AI scraping, as the images are still publically available when you access the gallery. It'll stop them being scraped from anywhere where the change has broken the links, sure, but that's cutting off your nose to spite your face.
I can see that off-site hotlinking was perhaps an issue, but *surely* that was resolvable so that calls from their own forum pages have authorisation.
I very rarely used links to the gallery myself, but that seems absurd. A 15-minute link would barely be useful in context of an active chat, much less for the perfectly legitimate purposes that people use gallery links for, like the forums. Or what if you wanted to show off your art someplace else? That would be good for Daz, in their best interests, I would think.
I've seen some dumb corporate decisions and ideas in my time, but not sure who thought gallery links that expire in a time measurable in minutes was a good strategy.
I have specifically put in a ticket with the help desk to complain about this, and strongly recommend that others do too.
They still might get brushed aside, but complaints in the ticket system count for more than just kvetching on the forums.
Daz has not said it is an AI-scraping counter-measure.
Because in typical fashion they haven't said anything. Leaving everyone to wonder why they've implemented such a change. I'm just not sure why they don't just get rid of the gallery if they're so intent on breaking every useful part of it.
This is not cool, I use that gallery links feature so often when deciding what to buy! Things like this shouldn't be changed without any kind of notification and even possible discussion beforehand. What can we do, and how should I go about linking my own images up in the future?
Well, as someone else suggested, I submitted a ticket. Had to go poke around in the website system to referesh my memory on how to do that, though. It is on https://www.daz3d.com/help/ and you scroll down and look for How do I contact customer service for an issue? which then leads to https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us
They haven't, but it's hardly a good thing that we haven't been given *any* reason why it was necessary to break many many years of image embeds.
I'm just saying I hope there's a better reason than that, because that's not a good one.
(Also, I'm pretty sure most of my stuff just inherently poisons AI training. Not because I've done anything to taint the image pixels, but because almost all of the big model training is done by first having another AI tool do all the image descriptions, and when I've tried those tools, none of them actually know how to describe my stuff correctly, so I would presumably actively confuse any subsequent training process done with those descriptions).
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Oh yes, I know that, but I mean besides raising a ticket? Is there a way to link / upload?
We have pointed out the ways in which this is causing problems; it isn't really going to be helped by a ticket.
Since we've been told that DAZ staff don't regularly read the forums, aren't tickets the only means of feedback on decisions like this?
The mods act as conduit to Daz staff. Richard said that mods pointed out the problems to Daz staff in his post. It will be up to Daz staff to address it. I would not expect anything to happen over the weekend.
So we shouldn't bother giving feedback because issues only matter if a mod thinks they matter? It seems to me like that's a system where DAZ would only receive biased and filtered feedback, not the actual concerns of their customers. The ticket system at least allows for real feedback to get through to someone in their office without a Mod having to decide if the feedback or the person giving it are worthy of notice.
No, but if we have already sent Daz a summary then indiviual reports via tickets won't add much - and we know that response times can already be down when there is an issue that generates numerous tickets, so holding off where possible does benefit other users.
tsroemi You can attach your image to the post and use the link to it to embed the image. Here's a page that has the step-by-step for that in detail: https://thinkdrawart.com/how-to-insert-inline-images-in-the-daz3d-forum (Is that what you're asking?)
If you've posted your image to the gallery and published it, then you can also link to the gallery page (the one with the image and the description), so people can head over to the gallery page itself to check out the render. (Unpublished pages won't work though.)
Hopefully we'll get a solution soon, and one that fixes the damage to the forums and daz deals too.
The problem is that a single bug report summary that doesn't take into account the impact on those affected is something that can easily be dismissed. And telling us not to give feedback comes off as "don't criticize the company"
You should do what you think is right. I did not mean to suggest otherwise. If posting a ticket will make you feel better, you should do that.
Another issue at play here is: How exactly do the links to the images work internally to the gallery system? Are the links that go directly to the image something that relies on an intermediate page that uses a random-generated string of characters, but that isn't actually tied to the internal name of the picture file itself, but instead just redirects to it? Or does the old direct-link to the image actually go to the actual filename of the image in the database. If the direct link to the image is some sort of obfuscated URL code, which works because they've stored that string-of-characters code somewhere in a database, which then keeps track of what image it goes to... and they've deleted this info out of the databse, then to restore back a previously issued link to the image -- i.e. the one we used to post it to a message here -- then the only way to restore that is to retrieve it from a backup. Periodically, they remove the oldest backups as new ones are made, which means that link info would then be gone. If this is the case, then they'd have to get on this FAST before those backups are gone.
On the other hand, if the link is something that's directly generated by what the actual image filename is, with the same URL as before, and can be recreated simply on what the actual filename is, and simply turning the feature that made the link back on creates an identical link again, then there's not as much of an urgency to this: They could turn the function back on six months from now, a year from now, and all the old links go back to working again.
It rather depends, then: Is the old link something where they'd created a random-string-of-letters URL that then had to be stored somewhere, and that then quietly and internally pulled up the image file, without actually telling you the real image file name... and that random-string-of-letters URL info gets deleted, then they're going to have to retrieve those form backups. If those have to be retrieved from backups, then time is of the essense here.
I wanted to flag up a different set of broken links I came across that are a little weird, in case the mods want to make a note of that. They're links to product pages, and before they used to display the main promo picture iirc, but now are coming up broken. Not sure what's going on with these as they're not gallery links.
I saw at least a couple of these in one of Novica's helpful threads today as I was looking up things I was considering getting:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5875026/#Comment_5875026
Thank you, I'm already doing it like this - what I meant was, is there a way to upload that will keep the images appearing for DAZDealz as well? But it seems not. This is such a bummer really, I always take extra care to collect all the links to the products I used because I myself rely so heavily on user renders when buying stuff. They should just revert back to the old system imo.
It's always the same base, so taking the link I previously posted, the base is:
https://storage.googleapis.com/daz3d-gallery-media/gallery/image/1363060/1739560182/main.jpg
Compared to the previous link, when Daz used another CDN domain name, most of the URL is exactly the same, 'gallery/image/1363060/1739560182/main.jpg' is part of both URL: https://gcdn.daz3d.com/gallery/image/1363060/1739560182/main.jpg
There is almost no risk to lose data (it's likely saved from hell and back by Google and while it's still possible to lose data, it would require a catastrophic event, either on Google side or Daz side).
But without all the keys appended after main.jpg, the request will be deemed invalid.
As an example, here the keys I'm speaking about, generated a couple of minutes ago (so likely not valid anymore when you'll read the message).
?X-Goog-Algorithm=GOOG4-RSA-SHA256&X-Goog-Credential=farnsworth-prod%40appspot.gserviceaccount.com%2F20250413%2Fauto%2Fstorage%2Fgoog4_request&X-Goog-Date=20250413T074534Z&X-Goog-Expires=899&X-Goog-Signature=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&X-Goog-SignedHeaders=host
Some keys will be always the same (likely the X-Goog-Algorithm, X-Goog-Credential and X-Goog-Expire) and other like X-Goog-Date and X-Goog-Signature are generated when you're accessing the gallery (at least every 15 minutes, due to the value of X-Goog-Expires).
As long as you're only looking at pictures through the gallery, you'll never have any problem, at least none that won't be solved by reloading the page you're looking at.
I don't know enough about how to solve the problem on the forum.
My guess is the best way would be for the forum to act toward a Daz 3D Gallery link the same way it's acting toward a Youtube link: automatically replacing the link with a copy of the main picture of a gallery (one with a perpetually valid link), clickable to go to the gallery itself (the cherry on top would be the possibility to like a gallery from the forum directly).